Toto

The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Anthony Le Donne

I first found a reference to this new book on April DeConick's forbiddengospels blog. So, as a post modern scholars do, Le Donne has given up all hope of finding the actual truth, but hopes to find something that is more reliable than story telling or myth, which he wants to call "social memory."

Now Jim West has started to review it here. He makes what I would consider to be an obvious point: In fact, psychologists who study memory have found that it is easy to create memories, using simple suggestions (no diabolical hypnosis is needed.)

I see this approach going nowhere as far as finding a historical Jesus, but the people who write about it can be interesting.

Roger Pearse

Cynic that I am, I tend to wonder whether they apply the same principles to their bank statements? "$200 in the red? Ah, but who knows whether that is really a truth at all..."

Clivedurdle

But money is a classic example of post modernism and myth and belief and faith. What does "I promise to pay the bearer..." mean?

DCHindley

It makes me laugh a bit when I see how worked up folks get when they are reminded that "history" is what WE think happened, and not concrete representations of what ACTUALLY happened. Postmodernists sometimes call the latter POV "naive realism." The reality is that at any one moment historical facts are always interpreted in relation to the present, and that perception of the present is the collective memory of a large and varied population of individuals, each with different individual experiences.

The same events can be "witnessed" from numerous perspectives. Ask a grandparent about WW2: For one it was about Europe & the Atlantic Ocean, for another Asia and the Pacific ocean. For yet others, it was about internment (Japanese Americans), or concentration and death camps (Nazi occupied anywhere, or Japanese occupied anywhere, or Soviet occupied anywhere). For many Japanese in the Pacific theater it was about honor or patriotism. For many Americans it was about revenge for the Pearl Harbor sneak attack during peacetime. Actor/Director Clint Eastwood, no namby pamby relativist liberal kook by any means, recognized this by creating two very different movies about the battle for Iwo Jima near the end of WW2, one from the POV of American soldiers and another from the POV of the Japanese soldiers. If he can do that, then so can we.

Even before time has erased much of the details (records decay and are destroyed, buildings get replaced or are crumbled away), the primary facts have already been processed into secondary myths, victors tweak the story to make their POV the "right" one, and even survivors of the opposition tweak their POV so it can be preserved as a "justified" one, even in defeat. Lets all just be careful not to let the myths that have fermented a life of their own from the facts obscure what we can really know about figures from history.

DCH